阅读理解In recent years, nonhuman animals have been

阅读理解Directions: This part consists of two sections. In Section A, there are three passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. In Section B, there are two passages followed by a total of 10 short-answer questions. Read the passages and write your answers on the Answer Sheet.Passage 2In 1977 the prestigious Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, Korea, announced the opening of the first women’s studies program in Asia. Few academic programs have ever received such public attention. In broadcast debates, critics dismissed the program as a betrayal of national identity, an imitation of Western ideas, and a distraction from the real task of national unification and economic development. Even supporters underestimated the program; they thought it would be merely another of the many Western ideas that had already proved useful in Asian culture, akin to airlines, electricity, and the assembly line. The founders of the program, however, realized that neither view was correct. They had some reservations about the applicability of Western feminist theories to the role of women in Asia and felt that such theories should be closely examined. Their approach has thus far yielded important critiques of Western theory, informed by the special experience of Asian women.For instance, like the Western feminist critique of the Freudian model of the human psyche, the Korean critique finds Freudian theory culture-bound, but in ways different from those cited by Western theorists. The Korean theorists claim that Freudian theory assumes the universality of the Western nuclear, male-headed family and focuses on the personality formation of the individual, independent of society. An analysis based on such assumptions could be valid for a highly competitive, individualistic society. In the Freudian family drama, family members are assumed to be engaged in a Darwinian struggle against each other—father against son and sibling against sibling. Such a concept projects the competitive model of Western society onto human personalities. But in the Asian concept of personality there is no ideal attached to individualism or to the independent self. The Western model of personality development does not explain major characteristics of the Korean personality, which is social and group-centered. The “self” is a social being defined by and acting in a group, and the well-being of both men and women is determined by the equilibrium of the group, not by individual self-assertion. The ideal is one of interdependency.In such a context, what is recognized as “dependency” in Western psychiatric terms is not, in Korean terms, an admission of weakness or failure. All this bears directly on the Asian perception of men’s and women’s psychology because men are also “dependent.” In Korean culture, men cry and otherwise easily show their emotions, something that might be considered a betrayal of masculinity in Western culture. In the kinship-based society of Korea, four generations may live in the same house, which means that people can be sons and daughters all their lives, whereas in Western culture, the roles of husband and son, wife and daughter, are often incompatible.

阅读理解Directions: There are 4 passages followed by somequestions or unfinished statements, you should answer thequestions or decide on the best choice on the AnswerSheet.Passage 4People all over the world know Wimbledon as the centre oflawn tennis. But most people do not know that it wasfamous for another game before tennis was invented.Wimbledon is now a part of Greater London. In 1874 it wasa country village, but it had a railway station and it wasthe home of the All-England Croquet Club. The Club hadbeen there since 1864. A lot of people played croquet inEngland at that time and enjoyed it, but the nationalchampionships did not attract many spectators. So the Clubhad very little money, and the members were looking forways of getting some.“This new game of lawn tennis seems to have plenty ofaction, and people like watching it, ” they thought.“Shall we allow people to play lawn tennis on some of ourbeautiful croquet lawns?In 1875 they changed the name of the Club to the “All-England Lawn Tennis Croquet Club” , and that is the namethat you will still find in the telephone book. Two yearslater, in 1877, Wimbledon held the first world lawn tennischampionship (men’ s singles) . The winner was S. W. Gore,a Londoner. There were 22 players, and 200 spectators,each paid one shilling. Those who watched were dressed inthe very latest fashion—the men hard top hats and longcoats, and the ladies in dresses that reached to theground! The Club gained ￡ 10. It was saved.Wimbledon grew. There was some surprise and doubt, ofcourse, when the Club allowed women to play in the firstwomen’ s singles championship in 1884. But the ladiesplayed well—even in long skirts that laid their legs andfeet—and the members got used to the idea. Until 1907 thewinners, both men and women, were always British. But moreand more countries were playing tennis, and in 1907 thefirst of many overseas victories went to an AustralianN. E. Brookes.Since 1923 the championships have been the “WimbledonChampionships” , but in fact people still think of theWimbledon winners as world champions. An Englishman, E J.Perry, won the men’ s singles three times in 1934-1936,but since that time the victory has usually gone to anAmerican or an Australian. In the women’ s singles,American girls have had most success since Helen Wills’wonderful run of victories in 1927-1930, 1932-1933, 1935and 1938. British spectators were very happy when anEnglish girl, Ann Jones won championship in 1969.The Wimbledon championships begin on the Monday nearest toJune 22, at a time when England often has its freestweather. It is not only because of the tennis that peoplelike to go there. When the weather is good, it is a verypleasant place to spend an afternoon. The grass if freshand green, the players wear beautiful white clothes, thespectators are dressed in the latest fashion, there may bemembers of the Royal Family among them, and there are cooldrinks in the open-air cafes next to the tennis courts.Millions of people watch the championships on television.The Club’ s ￡ 10 gain in 1877 has grown to more than ￡ 50,000 in the 1970s. Most of this goes to the Lawn TennisAssociation. But if you want to join the All England LawnTennis and Croquet Club, you will find that it is not atall easy. There are only 400 members—350 men and 50women. Singles champions are usually made honorarymembers. Some people say that the easiest way to become amember of the club is to win the singles in the WimbledonChampionships.

阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A. , B. , C. and D. You should decide on the best choice. Write your answers on the answer sheet.Passage ThreePicture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model of the time: male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you’ ll get a completely different impression. For a start, you will now see plenty more women—the University of Pennsylvania’ s Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new enrolment is female. You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and nationals of practically every country.It might be tempting, therefore, to think that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly, this apparent diversity is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex, skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones among the business leaders of the future.Diversity, it seems, has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership. So what can be done to create more effective managers of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programmers recruit their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria such as prior academic and career performance, and analytical and problem solving abilities. This is then coupled to a school’s picture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors. But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant succeed, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach-arguably the only diversity that in a business context, really matters.Professor Gauthier believes schools should not just be selecting candidates from traditional sectors such as banking, consultancy and industry. They should also be seeking individuals who . have backgrounds in areas such as political science, the creative arts, history or philosophy, which will allow them to put business decisions into a wider context.Indeed, there does seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders such diversity might create. A study by Manna a leadership development company, suggests that while the bully-boy chief executive of old may not have been eradicated completely, there is a definite shift in emphasis towards less tough styles of management-at least in America and Europe. Perhaps most significant, according to Manna, is the increasing interest large companies have in more collaborative management models, such as those prevalent in Scandinavia, which seek to integrate the hard and soft aspects of leadership and encourage delegated responsibility and accountability.

阅读理解Reading Passage 2Questions are based on the following readingpassage.A. Erecting the tallest building in the world is a pursuitboth pointless and exhilarating. Someone will always builda bigger one, but that doesn’ t diminish the intenseallure of height, which can make a building famous whetheror not there is anything else to recommend it Americanarchitect Frank Lloyd Wright, who never much liked cities,understood this perfectly when, in 1956, he unveiled afantasy known as the Mile High Illinois, a five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-story tower that he proposed for downtownChicago, overlooking Lake Michigan. An elegant spire,pencil-thin, it was a cavalier dismissal of the group ofboxy office buildings that were turning most of America’surban centers into a blur. Although it was unbuildable, itgrabbed more headlines than any real building could have,and it gave the illusion that Wright was in command of atype of building that he had always disdained.B. The Burj Khalifa, in Dubai—the new holder of the titleof World’ s Tallest Building—is no less extravagant amedia gesture. Unlike Wright’ s design, to which it bearsa starting resemblance, this building is very real—allone hundred and sixty stories (or two thousand sevenhundred and seventeen feet) of it. For decades,skyscrapers have been topping each other in only smallincrements: Kuala Lumpur’ s Petronas Towers (one thousandfour hundred and eighty-two feet) are thirty-two feettaller than Chicago’ s Sears Tower (or Willis Tower, as itis now called) ; the Shanghai World Financial Center isabout a hundred and thirty feet taller than the PetronasTowers; Taipei 101, in Taiwan, is fifty feet taller thanthe Shanghai tower; and so on. But the Burj Khalifarepresents a quantum leap over these midgets. Even if youput the Chrysler Building on top of the Empire StateBuilding, that still wouldn’ t equal its height.C. As with most super-tall buildings, function is hardlythe point of the Burj Khalifa. Certainly, it’ s not as ifthere weren’t enough land to build on in Dubai, or anyneed for more office or residential space, after a decade-long construction spree that makes the excesses of Floridalook almost prudent. Dubai doesn’t have as much oil assome other emirates, and saw a way to make itself rich byturning an expanse of sand beside the Arabian Gulf into anall-in-one business center, resort, and haven for flightcapital. When the tower was first planned, by EmaarProperties, a real-estate entity partly owned by thegovernment, it was called Burj Dubai, which means DubaiTower—just in case anyone might have missed the fact thatthe world’s most high-flying, come-from-nowhere city wasalso home to the world’s tallest building. But, while thebuilding was going up, growth in Dubai ground to a halt,leaving much of the new real estate unoccupied and unsold.This past November, Dubai ran out of money, was unable tomake Payments on sixty billion dollars’ worth of debt,and had to be rescued by a ten-billion-dollar bailout fromAbu Dhabi, the conservative, oil-rich emirate next door.At the building’s opening. Dubai announced that theskyscraper would bear the name of Abu Dhabi’s ruler,Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan. It’s as if GoldlmanSachs were to rename its new headquarters the WarrenBuffett Tower.D. Dubai is unlike any other city, but imagine a crossbetween Hong Kong and Las Vegas that tries to operate asif it were Switzerland, and you begin to get the idea.There are more glitzy glass towers than you can count,many of them put up not so much to house people orbusinesses as to give to rich Indians, Russians, Iranians,and Southeast Asians a place to park some cash away fromnosy local governments. Given the general level oftasteless showiness on display—not to mention the oftenappalling living conditions of Dubai’ s armies of migrantconstruction workers—the Burj Khalifa should be an easybuilding to loathe, and the embarrassing way that itscompletion coincided with the near-meltdown of Dubai’ seconomy makes it easy to mock as a symbol of hubris. Andyet the Burj Khatifa turns out to be far moresophisticated, even subtle, than one might expect. Thetower is a shimmering sliver needle, its delicacy asstartling as its height. You would think that anythingthis huge would dominate the sky, but the Burj Khalifapunctuates it instead.E. The tower was designed by the architect Adrian Smithand the engineer William Baker, both of Skidmore, Owings Merrill. (Smith left the firm during construction, andBaker and his colleagues George Efstathiou and Eric Tomichsaw the project through to completion. ) Skidmore has builtplenty of iconic skyscrapers before. A generation ago, itsarchitect-engineer team Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khanrevolutionized skyscraper design with the “bundled tube”structure of the Sears Tower. The Burj doesn’ t usebundled tubes, though to look at it from the outside youmight think it did. From a distance it looks like acluster of variously sized metal rods, the tallest at thecenter. The building has a Y-shaped floor plan, with threelobes buttressing a hexagonal central core, which housesthe elevators. The structure provides a lot of exteriorwalls with windows overlooking the Gulf and the desert.The first twenty or so floors are fairly bulky, giving thebuilding a wide stance on the ground, but as it risesthere is a spiralling sequence of setbacks. By the timeyou get about a third of the way to the top, the tower hasgracefully metamorphosed into a slender building, and itkeeps on narrowing until only a central section remains.F. One advantage of this configuration is that, becausethe building’ s shape varies at each level, wind cannotcreate an organized vortex around it, and stress on thestructure is thereby reduced. The setbacks, the Skidmoreteam likes to say, “confuse the wind. ” But the designhas an aesthetic virtue, too, giving the Burj Khalife, forall its twenty-first-century ingenuity, a lyrical profilethat calls to mind the skyscrapers of eighty or ninetyyears ago. The defining towers of the New York sky line,at least before the Second World War, were skinny comparedwith today’ s skyscrapers, and their vertical lines gaveintense visual pleasure. We’ ve sacrificed all that forefficiency: office tenants today want lots of horizontalspace, which means huge, open floors and stocky, ineleganttowers. The Burj Khalifa has three million square feet ofinterior space, which sounds like a lot, but in fact it isfour hundred thousand square feet less than the ShanghaiWorld Financial Center, which is fifty-nine storiesshorter. Even the MetLife Building, less than a third ofthe height of the Burj, has 2. 4 million square feet. TheBurj Khalifa can afford not to care about square footagebecause, notwithstanding a few small, high-priced officesuites on the narrow floors at the top, it isn’ t anoffice building. Most of the building is given over tocondominium apartments. (At the bottom, there will be ahotel designed and managed by Giorgio Armani) The decisionto make most of the building residential speaks volumesabout the extent to which Dubai’ s economy has been basedon the sale of condominiums to absentee owners forinvestment. Whether or not the decision to fill the towerwith apartments made economic sense, it was certainly theright thing to do architecturally. The profile of the Burjhas a magnetism that is lacking in almost every othersuper-tall building of our time. Furthermore, the towerdoesn’ t indulge in the showy engineering tricks that havebecome so common today it doesn’ t get wider as it rises,or lean to one side, or appear to be made of brokenshards. There is something appealing about a building thatrelies on the most, advanced, engineering but doesn’ tflaunt it.QuestionsFor each question below, choose the answer that bestcompletes the sentence. Then mark the corresponding letteron the Answer Sheet with a single line through the center.

阅读理解Directions: There are 7 passages in this section. Eachpassage is followed by some questions orunfinishedstatements. For each of them there are four choices markedA, B, C, and D. You should decideon the best choice.Passage 3In recent years, railroads have been combining with eachother, merging into super systems, causing heightenedconcerns about monopoly. As recently as 1995, the top fourrailroads accounted for under 70 percent of the total ten-miles moved by rails. Next year, after a series of mergersis completed, just four railroads will control well over90 percent of all the freight moved by major rail carders.Supporters of the new super systems argue that thesemergers will allow for substantial cost reductions andbetter coordinated service. Any threat of monopoly, theyargue, is removed by fierce competition from trucks. Butmany shippers complain that for heavy bulk commoditiestraveling long distances, such as coal, chemicals, andgrain, trucking is too costly and the railroads thereforehave them by the throat.The vast consolidation within the rail industry means thatmost shippers are served by only one rail company.Railroads typically charge such captive shippers 20 to30 percent more than they do when another railroad iscompeting for the business. Shippers who fed they arebeing overcharged have the right to appeal to the federalgovernment’ s Surface Transportation Board for raterelief, but the process is expensive, time consuming, andwill work only in truly extreme eases.Railroads justify rate discrimination against captiveshippers on the grounds that in the long run it reduceseveryone’ s cost. If railroads charged all customers thesame average rate, they argue, shippers who have theoption of switching to trucks or other forms oftransportation would do so, leaving remaining customers toshoulder the cost of keeping up the line. It’ s theory towhich many economists subscribe, but in practice it oftenleaves railroads in the position of determining whichcompanies will flourish and which will fail. Do we reallywant railroads to be the arbiters of who wins and wholoses in the marketplace？ Asks Martin Bercovici, aWashington lawyer who frequently represents shipper.Many captive shippers also worry they will soon be tiltwith a round of huge rate increases. The railroad industryas a whole, despite its brightening fortunes. Still doesnot earn enough to cover the cost of the capital it mustinvest to keep up with its surging traffic. Yet railroadscontinue to borrow billions to acquire one another, withWall Street cheering them on. Consider the $10. 2 billionbid by Norfolk Southern and CSX to acquire Conrail thisyear. Conrail’ s net railway operating income in 1996 wasjust $427 million, less than half of the carrying costs ofthe transaction. Who’ s going to pay for the rest of thebill？ Many captive shippers fear that they will, asNorfolk Southern and CSX increase their grip on themarket.

阅读理解Design of all the new tools and implements is based on careful experiments with electronic instruments. First, a human “guinea pig” is tested using a regular tool. Measurements are taken of the amount of work done, and the buildup of heat in the body. Twisted joints and stretched muscles can not perform as well, it has been found, as joints and muscles in their normal positions. The same person is then tested again, using a tool designed according to the suggestions made by Dr. Tichauer. All these tests have shown the great improvement of the new designs over the old.One of the electronic instruments used by Dr. Tichauer, the myograph, makes visible through electrical signals the work done by human muscle. Another machine measures any dangerous features of tools, thus proving information upon which to base a new design. One conclusion of tests made with this machine is that a tripod stepladder is more stable and safer to use than one with four legs.This work has attracted the attention of efficiency experts and time-and-motion-study engineer, but its value goes far beyond that. Dr. Tichauer’ s first thought is for the health of the tool user. With the repeated use of the same tool all day long on production lines and in other jobs, even light manual work can put a heavy stress on one small area of the body. In time, such stress can cause a disabling disease. Furthermore, muscle fatigue is a serious safety hazard.Efficiency is the by-product of comfort, Dr. Tichauer believes, and his new designs for traditional tools have proved his point.

阅读理解No one can be a great thinker who does not realize that as a thinker it is her first duty to follow her intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who with due study and preparation thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. Note that it is solely, of chiefly, to form great thinkers that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much or even more indispensable to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of. There have been and many again be great individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an intellectually active people. Where any of heterodox speculation was for a time suspended, where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed: where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable. Never when controversy avoided the subjects which are large and important enough to kindle enthusiasm was the mind of a people stirred up from its foundation and the impulse given which raised even persons of the most ordinary intellect to something of the dignity of thinking beings.She who knows only her own side of the case knows little of that. Her reasons may be food, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if she s equally unable to refute the reasons of the opposite side; if she does not so much as know what they are, she has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for her would be suspension of judgment, and unless she contents herself with that, she is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world the side to which she feels the most inclination. Nor is it enough that she should heat the arguments of adversaries from her own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with her own mind. She must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. She must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; she must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else she will never really possess herself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty, Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated persons are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know; they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrines which they themselves profess.

阅读理解A TRIP to the supermarket may not seem like an exercise in psychological warfare—but it is. Shopkeepers know that filling a store with the aroma of freshly baked bread makes people feel hungry and persuades them to buy more food than they had intended. Stocking the most expensive products at eye level makes them sell faster than cheaper but less visible competitors. Now researchers are investigating how “swarm intelligence” (that is, how ants, bees or any social animal, including humans, behave in a crowd) can be used to influence what people buy.At a recent conference on the simulation of adaptive behavior in Rome, Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, a computer scientist from the Florida Institute of Technology, described a new way to increase impulse buying using this phenomenon. Supermarkets already encourage shoppers to buy things they did not realize they wanted: for instance, by placing everyday items such as milk and eggs at the back of the store, forcing shoppers to walk past other tempting goods to reach them. Mr. Usmani and Ronaldo Menezes, also of the Florida Institute of Technology, set out to enhance this tendency to buy more by playing on the herd instinct. The idea is that, if a certain product is seen to be popular, shoppers are likely to choose it too. The challenge is to keep customers informed about what others are buying.Enter smart-cart technology. In Mr. Usmani’ s supermarket every product has a radio frequency identification tag, a sort of barcode that uses radio waves to transmit information, and every trolley has a scanner that reads this information and relays it to a central computer. As a customer walks past a shelf of goods, a screen on the shelf tells him how many people currently in the shop have chosen that particular product. If the number is high, he is more likely to select it too.Mr. Usmani’ s “swarm-moves” model appeals to supermarkets because it increases sales without the need to give people discounts. And it gives shoppers the satisfaction of knowing that they bought the “right” product—that is, the one everyone else bought. The model has not yet been tested widely in the real world, mainly because radio frequency identification technology is new and has only been installed experimentally in some supermarkets. But Mr. Usmani says that both Wal-Mart in America and Tesco in Britain are interested in his work, and testing will get under way in the spring.Another recent study on the power of social influence indicates that sales could, indeed, be boosted in this way. Matthew Salganik of Columbia University in New York and his colleagues have described creating an artificial music market in which some 14, 000 people downloaded previously unknown songs. The researchers found that when people could see the songs ranked by how many times they had been downloaded, they followed the crowd. When the songs were not ordered by rank, but the number of times they had been downloaded was displayed, the effect of social influence was still there but was less pronounced. People thus follow the herd when it is easy for them to do so.In Japan a chain of convenience shops called RanKing RanQueen has been ordering its products according to sales data from department stores and research companies. The shops sell only the most popular items in each product category, and the rankings are updated weekly. Icosystem, a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also aims to exploit knowledge of social networking to improve sales.And the psychology that works in physical stores is just as potent on the internet. Online retailers such as Amazon are adept at telling shoppers which products are popular with like-minded consumers. Even in the privacy of your home, you can still be part of the swarm.Questions(1)-(6)：Complete the sentences below with words taken from the reading passage. Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.Questions(7)-(10)：Do the following statements agree with the information given in the reading passage? For questions write:YES if the statement agrees with the informationNO if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information about this in the passage

阅读理解" I've been expecting you!" Marek repeated,

阅读理解Complete the summary below Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.Professor Pretty concludes that our 【A1】______ are higher than most people realize, because we make three different types of payment. He feels it is realistic to suggest that Britain should reduce its reliance on 【A2】______. Although most farmers would be unable to adapt to, 【A3】______, Professor Pretty wants the government to initiate change by establishing what he refers to as a 【A4】______. He feels this would help to change the attitudes of both 【A5】______ and ______.

阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A. , B. , C. and D. You should decide on the best choice. Write your answers on the answer sheet.Passage TwoThe University in Transformation, edited by Australian futurists Sohail Inayatullah and Jennifer Gidley, presents some 20 highly varied outlooks on tomorrow’ s universities by writers representing both Western and non-Western perspectives. Their essays raise a broad range of issues, questioning nearly every key assumption we have about higher education today.The most widely discussed alternative to the traditional campus is the Internet University-a voluntary community to scholars/teachers physically scattered throughout a country or around the world but all linked in cyberspace. A computerized university could have many advantages, such as easy scheduling, efficient delivery of lectures to thousands or even millions of students at once, and ready access for students everywhere to the resources of all the world’ s great libraries.Yet the Internet University poses dangers， too. For example, a line of franchised courseware produced by a few superstar teachers, marketed under the brand name of a famous institution, and heavily advertised, might eventually come to dominate the global education marked warns sociology professor Peter Manicas of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Besides enforcing a rigidly standardized curriculum, such a “college education in a box” could undersell the offerings of many traditional brick and mortar institutions, effectively driving them out of business and throwing thousands of career academics out of work, note Australian communications professors David Rooney and Greg Hearn.On the other hand, while global connectivity seems highly likely to play some significant I role in future higher education, that does not mean greater uniformity in course content—or other dangers-will necessarily follow. Counter-movements are also at work.Many in academia, including scholars contributing to this volume, are questioning the fundamental mission of university education. What if, for instance, instead of receiving primarily technical training and building their individual careers, university students and professors could focus their learning and research efforts on existing problems in their local communities and the world? Feminist scholar Ivana Milosevic dares to dream what a university might become “if we believed that childcare workers and teachers in early childhood education should be one of the highest (rather than lowest) paid professionals?”Co-editor Jennifer Gidley shows how tomorrow , s university faculty, instead of giving lectures and conducting independent research may take on three new roles. Some would act as brokers, assembling customized degree-credit programmes for individual students by mixing and matching the best course offerings available from institutions all around the world.A second group, mentors, would function much like today’ s faculty advisers, but are likely to be working with many more students outside their own academic specialty. This would require them to constantly be learning from their students as well as instructing them. A third new role for faculty, and in Gidley’ s view the most challenging and rewarding of all, would be as meaning-makers: charismatic sages and practitioners leading groups of students/colleagues in collaborative efforts to find spiritual as well as rational and technological solutions to specific real-world problems. Moreover, there seems little reason to suppose that anyone form of university must necessarily drive out all other options. Students may be “enrolled ” in courses offered at virtual campuses on the Internet, between—or even during- sessions at a real world problem focused institution.As co-editor Sohail Inayatullah points out in his introduction, no future is inevitable, and the very act of imagining and thinking through alternative possibilities can directly affect how thoughtfully, creatively and urgently even a dominant technology is adapted and applied. Even in academia, the future belongs to those who care enough to work their visions into practical, sustainable realities.

阅读理解For years, doctors advised their patients that the only thing taking multivitamins does is give them expensive urine. After all, true vitamin deficiencies are practically unheard of in industrialized countries. Now it seems those doctors may have been wrong. The result of a growing number of studies suggests that even a modest vitamin shortfall can be harmful to your health. Although proof of the benefits of multivitamins is still far from certain, the few dollars you spend on them is probably a good investment.Or at least that’ s the argument put forward in the New England Journal of Medicine. Ideally, say Dr. Walter Willett and Dr. Meir Stampfer of Harvard, all vitamin supplements would be evaluated in scientifically rigorous clinical trials. But those studies can take a long time and often raise more questions than they answer. At some point, while researchers work on figuring out where the truth lies, it just makes sense to say the potential benefit outweighs the cost.The best evidence to date concerns foliates, one of the B vitamins. It’ s been proved to limit the number of defects in embryos, and a recent trial found that foliate in combination with vitamin B12 and a form of B6 also decreases the re-blockage of arteries after surgical repair.The news on vitamin E has been mixed. Healthy folks who take 400 international units daily for at least two yean appear somewhat less likely to develop heart disease. But when doctors give vitamin E to patients who already have heart disease, the vitamin doesn’ t seem to help. It may turn out that vitamin E plays a role in prevention but cannot undo serious damage.Despite vitamin C’ s great popularity, consuming large amounts of it still has not been positively linked to any great benefit. The body quickly becomes saturated with C and simply excretes any excess.The multivitamins question boils down to this: Do you need to wait until all the evidence is in before you take them, or are you willing to accept that there’ s enough evidence that they don’ t hurt and could help?If the latter, there’ s no need to go to extremes and buy the biggest horse pills or the most expensive bottles. Large dose can cause trouble, including excessive bleeding and nervous system problems.Multivitamins are no substitute for exercise and a balanced diet, of course. As long as you understand that any potential benefit is modest and subject to further refinement, taking a daily multivitamin makes a lot of sense.

阅读理解Passage 2Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a perfect example of how sometimes science moves more slowly than we would have predicted. In the first flush of enthusiasm at the invention of computers it was believed that we now finally had the tools with which to crack the problem of the mind, and within years we would see a new race of intelligent machines. We are older and wiser now. The first rush of enthusiasm is gone, the computers that impressed us so much back then do not impress us now, and we are soberly settling down to understand how hard the problems of AI really are.What is AI? In some sense it is engineering inspired by biology. We look at animals, we look at humans and we want to be able to build machines that do what they do. We want machines to be able to learn in the way that they learn, to speak, to reason and eventually to have consciousness. AI is engineering but, at this stage, is it also science? Is it, for example, modeling in cognitive science? We would like to think that is both engineering and science but the contributions that it has made to cognitive science so far are perhaps weaker than the contributions that biology has given to the engineering.Looking back at the history of AI, we can see that perhaps it began at the wrong end of the spectrum. If AI had been tackled logically, it would perhaps have begun as an artificial biology, looking at living things and saying Can we model these with machines?” The working hypothesis would have been that living things are physical systems so let’ s try and see where the modeling takes us and where it breaks down. Artificial biology would look at the evolution of physical systems in general, development from infant to adult, self-organization, complexity and so on. Then, as a subfield of that, a sort of artificial zoology that looks at sensorimotor behavior， vision and navigation, recognizing, avoiding and manipulating objects, basic, pre-linguistic learning and planning, and the simplest forms of internal representations of external objects. And finally, as a further subfield of this, an artificial psychology that looks at human behavior where we deal with abstract reasoning, language, speech and social culture, and all those philosophical conundrums like consciousness, free will and so forth.That would have been a logical progression and is what should have happened. But what did happen was that what people thought of as intelligence was the stuff that impresses us. Our peers are impressed by things like doing complex mathematics and playing a good chess game. The ability to walk, in contrast, doesn’ t impress anyone. You can’ t say to your friends, “Look, I can walk” , because your friends can walk too.So all those problems that toddlers grapple with every day were seen as unglamorous, boring, and probably pretty easy anyway. The really hard problems, clearly, were things demanding abstract thought, like chess and mathematical theorem proving. Everyone ignored the animal and went straight to the human, and the adult human too, not even the child human. And this is what ‘AI’ has come to mean - artificial adult human intelligence. But what has happened over the last 40-50 years - to the disappointment of all those who made breathless predictions about where AI would go -is that things such as playing chess have turned out to be incredibly easy for computers, whereas learning to walk and learning to get around in the world without falling over has proved to be unbelievably difficult.And it is not as if we can ignore the latter skills and just carry on with human-level AI. It has proved very difficult to endow machines with ‘common sense’ ， emotions and those other intangibles which seem to drive much intelligent human behavior, and it does seem that these may come more from our long history of interactions with the world and other humans than from any abstract reasoning and logical deduction. That is, the animal and child levels may be the key to making really convincing, well-rounded forms of intelligence, rather than the intelligence of chess-playing machines like Deep Blue, which are too easy to dismiss as mindless’ .In retrospect, the new view makes sense. It took 3 billion years of evolution to produce apes, and then only another 2 million years or so for languages and all the things that we are impressed by to appear. That’ s perhaps an indication that once you’ ve got the mobile， tactile monkey, once you’ ve got the Homo erectus， those human skills can evolve fairly quickly. It may be a fairly trivial matter for language and reasoning to evolve in a creature which can already find its way around the world.The new AI, and the new optimism. That s certainly what the history of AI has served to bear out. As a result, there has been a revolution in the field which goes by names such as Artificial Life (AL) and Adaptive Behavior, trying to re-situate AI within the context of an artificial biology and zoology (respectively) . The basic philosophy is that we need much more understanding of the animal substrates of human behavior before we can fulfil the dreams of AI in replicating convincing well-rounded intelligence.(Incidentally, the reader should note that the terminology is in chaos, as fields re-group and re-define themselves. For example, I work on artificial zoology but describe myself casually as doing AI. This chaos can, however, be seen as a healthy sign of a field which has not yet stabilized. Any young scientist with imagination should realize that these are the kind of fields to get into. Who wants to be in a field where everything was solved long ago?)So AI is not dead, but re-grouping, and is still being driven, as always, by testable scientific models. Discussions on philosophical questions, such as ‘What is life?’ or ‘What is intelligence? change little over the years. There have been numerous attempts， from Roger Penrose to Gerald Edelman, to disprove AI (show that it is impossible) but none of these attempted revolutions has yet gathered much momentum. This is not just because of lack of agreement with their philosophical analysis (although there is plenty of that) , but also perhaps because they fail to provide an alternative paradigm in which we can do science. Progress, as is normal in science, comes from building things and running experiments, and the flow of new and strange machines from AI laboratories is not remotely exhausted. On the contrary, it has been recently invigorated by the new biological approach.In fact, the old optimism has even been resurrected. Professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading has recently predicted that the new approach will lead to human-level AI in our lifetimes. But I think we have learned our lesson on that one. I, and many like me in new AI, imagine that this is still Physics before Newton, that the field might have a good one or two hundred years left to run. The reason is that there is no obvious way of getting from here to there - to human-level intelligence from the rather useless robots and brittle software programs that we have nowadays. A long series of conceptual breakthroughs are needed, and this kind of thinking is very difficult to timetable. What we are trying to do in the next generation is essentially to find out what are the right questions to ask.I think that people who are worried about robots taking over the world should go to a robotics conference and watch these things try to walk. They fall over, bump into walls and end up with their legs thrashing or wheels spinning in the air. I’ m told that in this summer s Robotic Football competition, the losing player scored all five goals - 2 against the opposing robot, and 3 against himself. The winner presumably just fell over.Robots are more helpless than threatening. They are really quite sweet I was in the MIT robotics laboratory once looking at Cog, Rodney Brooks, latest robot Poor Cog has no legs. He is a sort of humanoid, a torso stuck on a stand with arms, grippers, binocular vision and so on. I saw Cog on a Sunday afternoon in a darkened laboratory when everyone had gone home and I felt sorry for him which I know is mad. But it was Sunday afternoon and no one was going to come and play with him. If you consider the gulf between that and what most animals experience in their lives, surrounded by a tribe of fellow infants and adults, growing up with parents who are constantly with them and constantly stimulating them, then you understand the incredibly limited kind of life that artificial systems have.The argument I am developing is that there may be limits to AI, not because the hypothesis of ‘strong AV is false, but for more mundane reasons. The argument, which I develop further on my website, is that you can t expect to build single isolated AFs, alone in laboratories, and get anywhere. Unless the creatures can have the space in which to evolve a rich culture, with repeated social interaction with things that are like them, you can t really expect to get beyond a certain stage. If we work up from insects to dogs to Homo erectus to humans, the AI project will I claim fall apart somewhere around the Homo erectus stage because of our inability to provide them with a real cultural environment. We cannot make millions of these things and give them the living space in which to develop their own primitive societies, language and cultures. We can’ t because the planet is already full. That’ s the main argument, and the reason for the title of this talk.So what will happen? What will happen over the next thirty years is that we will see new types of animal-inspired machines that are more mossy and unpredictable than any we have seen before. These machines will change over time as a result of their interactions with us and with the world. These silent, pre-linguistic, animal-like machines will be nothing like humans but they will gradually come to seem like a strange sort of animal. Machines that learn, familiar to researchers in labs for many years, will finally become mainstream and enter the public consciousness.What category of problems could animal-like machines address? The kind of problems we are going to see this approach tackle will be problems that are somewhat noise and error resistant and that do not demand abstract reasoning. A special focus will be behavior that is easier to learn than to articulate - most of us know how to walk but we couldn’ t possibly tell anyone how we do it. Similarly with grasping objects and other such skills. These things involve building neural networks, filling in state-spaces and so on, and cannot be captured as a set of rules that we speak in language. You must experience the dynamics of your own body in infancy and thrash about until the changing internal numbers and weights start to converge on the correct behavior. Different bodies mean different dynamics. And robots that can learn to walk can learn other sensorimotor skills that we can neither articulate nor perform ourselves.What are examples of these type of problems? Well, for example, there are already autonomous lawnmowers that will wander around gardens all afternoon. The next step might be autonomous vacuum cleaners inside the house (though clutter and stairs present immediate problems for wheeled robots) . These are all sorts of other uses for artificial animals in areas where people find jobs dangerous or tedious-land-mine clearance, toxic waste clearance, farming, mining, demolition, finding objects and robotic exploration, for example. Any jobs done currently or traditionally by animals would be a focus. We are familiar already from the Mars Pathfinder and other examples that we can send autonomous robots not only to inhospitable places, but also send them there on cheap one-way suicide^ missions. (Of course, no machine ever Mies5, since we can restore its mind in a new body on earth after the mission. )Whether these type of machines may have a future in the home is an interesting question. If it ever happens, I think it will be because the robot is treated as a kind of pet, so that a machine roaming the house is regarded as cute rather than creepy. Machines that learn tend to develop an individual, unrepeatable character which humans can find quite attractive. There are already a few games in software - such as the Windows-based game Creatures, and the little Tamagotchi toys- whose personalities people can get very attached to. A major part of the appeal is the unique, fragile and unrepeatable nature of the software beings you interact with. If your Creature dies, you may never be able to raise another one like it again. Machines in the future will be similar, and the family robot will after a few years be, like a pet, literally irreplaceable.What will hold things up? There are many things that could hold up progress but hardware is the one that is staring us in the face at the moment. Nobody is going to buy a robotic vacuum cleaner that costs $5000 no matter how many big cute eyes are painted on it or even if it has a voice that says, “I love you” . Many conceptual breakthroughs will be needed to create artificial animals. The major theoretical issue to be solved is probably representation: what is language and how do we classify the world. We say ‘That’ s a table， and so on for different objects， but what does an insect do, what is going on in an insect’ s head when it distinguishes objects in the world, what information is being passed around inside, what kind of data structures are they using. Each robot will have to learn an internal language customized for its sensorimotor system and the particular environmental niche in which it finds itself. It will have to learn this internal language on its own, since any representations we attempt to impose on it, coming from a different sensorimotor world, will probably not work.Finally, what will be the impact on society of animal-like machines? Let’ s make a few predictions that I will later look back and laugh at.First, family robots may be permanently connected to wireless family intranets, sharing information with those who you want to know where you are. You may never need to worry if your loved ones are alright when they are late or far away, because you will be permanently connected to them. Crime may get difficult if all family homes are full of half-aware, loyal family machines. In the future, we may never be entirely alone, and if the controls are in the hands of our loved ones rather than the state, that may not be such a bad thing.Slightly further ahead, if some of the intelligence of the horse can be put back into the automobile, thousands of lives could be saved, as cars become nervous of their drunk owners, and refuse to get into positions where they would crash at high speed. We may look back in amazement at the carnage tolerated in this age, when every western country had road deaths equivalent to a long, slow-burning war. In the future, drunks will be able to use cars, which will take them home like loyal horses. And not just drunks, but children, the old and infirm, the blind, all will be empowered.Eventually, if cars were all (wireless) networked, and humans stopped driving altogether, we might scrap the vast amount of clutter all over our road system—signposts, markings, traffic lights, roundabouts, central reservations—and return our roads to a soft, sparse, eighteenth-century look. All the information—negotiation with other cars, traffic and route updates—would come over the network invisibly. And our towns and countryside would look so much sparser and more peaceful.I’ ve been trying to give an idea of how artificial animals could be useful, but the reason that Tm interested in them is the hope that artificial animals will provide the route to artificial humans. But the latter is not going to happen in our lifetimes (and indeed may never happen, at least not in any straightforward way) .In the coming decades, we shouldn t expect that the human race will become extinct and be replaced by robots. We can expect that classical AI will go on producing more and more sophisticated applications in restricted domains- expert systems, chess programs, Internet agents—but any time we expect common sense we will continue to be disappointed as we have been in the past. At vulnerable points these will continue to be exposed as ‘blind automata’ . Whereas animal-based AI or AL will go on producing stranger and stranger machines, less rationally intelligent but more rounded and whole, in which we will start to feel that there is somebody at home, in a strange animal kind of way. In conclusion, we won5t see full AI in our lives, but we should live to get a good feel for whether or not it is possible, and how it could be achieved by our descendants.

阅读理解About six years ago I was eating lunch in a restaurant in New York City when a woman and a young boy sat down at the next table, I couldn’t help overhearing parts of their conversation. At one point the woman asked, “So, how have you been?” And the boy—who could not have been more than seven or eight years old—replied.” Frankly, I’ve been feeling a little depressed lately.”This incident stuck in my mind because it confirmed my growing belief that children are changing. As far as I can remember, my friends and I didn’t find out we were “depressed”, that is, in low spirits, until we were in high school.Undoubtedly a change in children has increased steadily in recent years. Children don’t seem childlike anymore. Children speak more like adults, dress more like adults and behave more like adults than they used to.Whether this is good or bad is difficult to say, but it certainly is different. Childhood as it once was no longer exists. Why?Human development is depended not only on born biological states, but also on patterns of gaining social knowledge. Movement from one social role to another usually involves learning the secrets of the new social positions. Children have always been taught adult secrets, but slowly and in stages; traditionally, we tell sixth graders things we keep hidden from fifth graders.In the last 30 years, however, a secret-revelation machine has been equipped in 98 percent of American homes. It is called television. Television passes information to all viewers alike, whether they are children or adults. Unable to resist the temptation, many children turn their attention from printed texts to the less challenging, more attractive moving pictures.Communication through print, as a matter of fact, allows for a great deal of control over the social information which children will gain. Children must read simple books before they can read complex materials.

阅读理解Directions： Read the following passages that are followed by some questions respectively. For each question there are four answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best： answer to each of the questions after reading the corresponding passage.Passage 1 Demands for stronger protection for wildlife in Britain sometimes hide the fact that similar needs are felt in the rest of Europe. Studies by the Council of Europe, of which 21countries are members, have shown that 45 per cent of reptile species mad 24 per cent of butterflies are in danger of dying out. European concern for wildlife was outlined by Dr. Peter Baum, an expert in the environment and nature resources division of the council, when he spoke at a conference arranged by the administrators of a British national park. The park is one； of the few areas in Europe to hold the council’ s diploma for nature reserves of the highest quality, and Dr. Baum had come to present it to the park once again. He was afraid that public opinion was turning against national parks, and that those set up in the l960s and 1970s could not be set up today. But Dr. Baum clearly remained a strong supporter of the view that natural environments needed to be allowed to survive in peace in their own right. No area could be, expected to survive both as a true nature reserve and as a tourist attraction, he went on. The short view that reserves had to serve： immediate human demands for outdoor recreation should be replaced by full acceptance of their importance as places to preserve nature for the future. We forget that they are the guarantee of life systems, on which any built-up are area ultimately depends, Dr. Baum went on. ¨ We could manage without most industrial products, but we could not manage without nature. However, our natural environment areas, which are the original parts of our countryside, have shrunk to become mere islands in a, spoiled and highly polluted land mass.

阅读理解The Working Time Regulations(WTRs)introduced

阅读理解Passage FourIn the North American colonies, red ware, a simple pottery fired at low temperatures, and stone ware, a strong, impervious grey pottery fired at high temperatures, were produced from two different native clays. These kinds of pottery were produced to supplement imported European pottery. When the American Revolution (1775-1783) interrupted the flow of the superior European ware, there was incentive for American potters to replace the imports with comparable domestic goods. Stoneware, which had been simple, utilitarian kitchenware, grew increasingly ornate throughout the nineteenth century, and in addition to the earlier scratched and drawn designs, three-dimensional molded relief decoration became popular. Representational motifs largely replaced the earlier abstract decorations. Birds and flowers were particularly evident, but other subjects—lions, flags, and clipper ships—are found. Some figurines, mainly of dogs and lions, were made in this medium. Sometimes a name, usually that of the potter, was die-stamped onto a piece.As more and more large kilns were built to create the high-fired stoneware, experiments revealed that the same clay used to produce low-fired red ware could produce a stronger, paler pottery if fired at a hotter temperature. The result was yellow ware, used largely for serviceable items; but a further development was Rockingham ware—one of the most important American ceramics of the nineteenth century. (The name of the ware was probably derived from its resemblance to English brown-glazed earthenware made in South Yorkshire. ) It was created by adding a brown glaze to the fired clay, usually giving the finished product a mottled appearance. Various methods of spattering or sponging the glaze onto to the ware account for the extremely wide variations in color and add to the interest of collecting, Rockingham. An advanced form of Rockingham was flint enamel, created by dusting metallic powders onto the Rockingham glaze to produce brilliant varicolored streaks.Articles for nearly every household activity ornament could be bought in Rockingham ware: dishes and bowls, of course; also bedpans, foot warmers, cuspidors, lamp bases, doorknobs, molds, picture frames, even curtain tiebacks. All these items are highly collectible today and are eagerly sought. A few Rockingham specialties command particular affection among collectors and correspondingly high prices.

阅读理解Those who welcomed the railway saw it as more than a rapid and comfortable means of passing. They actually saw it as a factor in world peace. They did not foresee that the railway would be just one more means for the rapid movement of aggressive armies. None of them foresaw that the more we are together--the more chances there are of war. Any boy or girl who is one of a large family knows that.Whenever any new invention is put forward, those for it and those against it can always find medical men to approve or condemn. The anti-railway group produced doctors who said that tunnels would be most dangerous to public health: they would produce colds, catarrhs(黏膜炎) and consumptions. The deafening noise and the glare of the engine fire, would have a bad effect on the nerves. Further, being moved through the air at a high speed would do grave injury to delicate lungs. In those with high blood pressure, the movement of the train might produce apoplexy. The sudden plunging of a train into the darkness of a tunnel, and the equally sudden rush into full daylight, would cause great damage to eyesight. But the pro-railway group was of course able to produce equally famous medical men to say just the opposite. They said that the speed and swing of the train would equalize the circulation, promote digestion, tranquilize the nerves, and ensure good sleep.The actual rolling-stock was anything but comfortable. If it was a test of endurance to sit for four hours outside a coach in rain, or inside in dirty air, the railway offered little more in the way of comfort. Certainly the first- class carriages had cushioned seats; but the second-class had only narrow bare boards, while the third-class had nothing at all; no seats and no roof; they were just open trucks. So that third-class passengers gained nothing from the few modes except speed. In the matter of comfort, indeed they lost; they did, on the coaches, have a seat, but now they had to stand all the way, which gave opportunities to the comic press. This kind of thing: “A man was seen yesterday buying a third-class ticket for the new London and Birmingham Railway. The state of his mind is being enquired into” .A writer in the early days of railways wrote feelingly of both second-and third-class carriages. He made the suggestion that the directors of the railways must have sent all over the world to find the hardest possible wood. Of the open third-class trucks he said that they had the peculiar property of meeting the rain from whatever quarter it came. He described them as horizontal shower- baths, from whose searching power there was no escape.

阅读理解In this section, you will read a passage. Answer the questions after reading the passage. Write your answer on the answer sheet.Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences, veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of killed. He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled above the other in the west facing her window.She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will-as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been.When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: Free, free, free! The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending her in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.And yet she had loved him-sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion, which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!Free! Body and soul free! She kept whispering.Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the key hole, imploring for admission. Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door-you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.Go away. I am not making myself ill. No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.Someone was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his gripsack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.But Richards was too late. She died of heart attack. The doctor’s said it was caused by joy.Comprehension Questions